The first entrance applause occurs before even the overture begins. Riotous clapping is occasioned when a bright point of light travels over the ceiling and the curtain of the Lunt-Fontanne Theater in New York, where the push-button, button-pushing musical “Finding Neverland” opened on Wednesday night.

This little light, you see, is pretty much guaranteed to elicit a Pavlovian response from anyone familiar with the story of “Peter Pan” in its various incarnations, which surely includes everyone who shelled out the big bucks for this show. Said light equals Tinker Bell, the temperamental fairy who requires your applause to stay alive.

Clap if you believe in brand names.

Directed by Diane Paulus — with the guidance of Harvey Weinstein, its chief producer — “Finding Neverland” is filled with such triggers. The most brazen, perhaps, comes when an English actor in a pub asks an American, “Do they say ‘cheers’ where you come from, mate?”

The simple query sets the audience aroar. That’s because the man playing the American happens to be Kelsey Grammer, who was a regular on the long-running sitcom “Cheers.” Neither Mr. Grammer nor the show’s leading man, Matthew Morrison (of the television series “Glee”), appear wholly invested in their performances. But that’s O.K. Their mere presences do most of the work for them.

As with many a Broadway musical these days, “Finding Neverland” — which features a book by James Graham and sticky soft-pop power ballads by Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy — is based on a popular film. That would be the 2004 biopic about the playwright J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, which starred Johnny Depp and for which Mr. Weinstein was an executive producer.

The stage version of “Finding Neverland” is no replica of the film, though it might have been better if it were. Instead, it heightens the screenplay’s sentimentality, tidy psychologizing and life-affirming messages by thickening their syrup and corn quotients in ways presumably deemed palatable to theatergoing children and their parents. The show brings to mind those supersize sodas sold in movie theaters, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg once quixotically campaigned against.

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Melanie Moore plays Peter Pan in “Finding Neverland” at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, with Laura Michelle Kelly, seated center left, and Matthew Morrison.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

Like such drinks, “Finding Neverland” is largely made up of empty calories. Perhaps the nutrients were leached out of it by its long and arduous gestation. First presented in Leicester, England, in 2012, the show was reborn and completely retooled at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., where I saw it last summer.

It didn’t seem quite as objectionable to me at that time. This was partly because it was still a work in progress, partly because it was on a smaller scale and partly because that production’s Barrie, Jeremy Jordan, exuded a sweetness-thinning anguish that seemed to be about something other than an actor’s being stuck in an uncomfortable production.

For New York, Mr. Jordan has been replaced with the more famous (and more Ken-doll handsome) Mr. Morrison. The Cambridge version’s original, agreeable leading lady, Laura Michelle Kelly, remains. But Mr. Grammer has been brought in to fill the double supporting roles of Barrie’s American producer, Charles Frohman, and of Captain Hook (replacing a very good Michael McGrath), the fictional creation who in this version springs out of Barrie’s id for the first-act finale.

That’s right. It takes an id to create a Neverland in this account of Barrie’s life. At the beginning our bearded, Scottish-born hero is a successful and fashionable playwright suffering from writer’s block and an unhappy marriage to a superficial socialite (Teal Wicks).

Then one day in Kensington Gardens, he meets four enchanting little boys, the Llewelyn Davies brothers. He happily joins in their rambunctious games of pretend, which testify to the philosophy, later expressed in song, that “the world is so mysterious and wild/when you start to see it through the eyes of a child.”

The spectacle of a strange man playing in the park with pink-cheeked kids usually sets off alarm bells, at least in this era of the Amber Alert. But not to worry. Mr. Morrison, in a determinedly neutral performance, has been divested of any hints of sensuality.

What’s more, those boys have a mother, Sylvia (Ms. Kelly), a widow with a bad cough and an inner child who immediately gravitates to Barrie, to whom she says, “I think to have faith is to have wings.” And from romping with Sylvia and her sons, Barrie will discover that playtime can inspire a play. Thus is born the work that will guarantee his immortality, as well as theater’s most enduring portrait of arrested development.

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Laura Michelle Kelly and Matthew Morrison in "Finding Neverland."CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

Featuring a blue-tinged vintage postcard-like set by Scott Pask, with period costumes by Suttirat Anne Larlarb, “Finding Neverland” follows Barrie’s struggles against his own inhibitions and a world of starchy, disapproving grown-ups. Like the Disney stage version of “Mary Poppins” (which starred Ms. Kelly in London), the show zigzags between sunlight and midnight (Kenneth Posner did the lighting), what with Sylvia’s ominous cough and Barrie’s itchy id.

But there’s always sugar in the shadows, even in that climactic fantasy sequence when Captain Hook materializes to tell Barrie to get in touch with his dark side. “Unleash me!” he instructs Barrie. And our hero loosens up enough to tear open his shirt, center-stage, and, in the second act, to finally share a kiss with Sylvia.

Barrie’s evolution is set to a score that brings to mind the songs that accompany animated adventure films and are favored by contestants on “The Voice” and “American Idol.” (Mr. Barlow, the composer, was an original member of the British boy band Take That and a judge on an “American Idol”-style British television series.)

Every song — the titles include “Circus of Your Mind” and “We’re All Made of Stars” — vaguely reminds you of some recording you have heard in the background of your life. How can you hear the wail of a penny whistle without thinking of Celine Dion bewailing the titular ship’s sinking in “Titanic”? (Ms. Kelly and Mr. Morrison even strike the signature pose of the star-crossed lovers from that movie.)

I’m assuming the theory is that high volume will obliterate our awareness that this music is fatally ersatz. But there’s no disguising the feeling that almost every element of the production has a secondhand, synthetic quality: the dialogue, the jerky choreography (by Mia Michaels), the jokes, the anachronistic depiction of the show people who put on Barrie’s plays. (One of them, asked if he believes in fairies, answers: “My good man, I work in the theater. I see them every day.”)

It may well be the show’s very lack of freshness that accounts for its appeal. “Finding Neverland” was a sellout in Cambridge, and it’s already doing boffo box office here. When Barrie says he’s working on a new and surprising play, his producer, Frohman, responds that he doesn’t like surprises.

“I said I wanted something new,” he says. “New does not necessarily mean different. Think of it like — a new penny. It looks and feels the same as an old penny, right? It’s just — shinier.” By this criterion, “Finding Neverland” might well be a Charles Frohman production.

Finding Neverland

Book by James Graham; Music and Lyrics by Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy; Based on the Miramax motion picture by David Magee and the play "The Man Who Was Peter Pan" by Allan Knee; Directed by Diane Paulus; Choreography by Mia Michaels